Evan, I ran across your post and wanted to share a couple of resources that might be useful to you. First things first, I want to give credit where credit is due: I first learned of all of these resources curtesy of Johnn Four's Roleplaying Tips site and newsletter. If you haven't checked out his site you should: it is a massive treasure trove of articles and resources that goes back for years! OK, first up is an article that has a really creative alternative to creating massive maps. Abstract Dungeoneering | The Angry DM Here is the first paragraph of the article: So, Twitter-friend @BrannonHutchins has been having some mapping troubles this week. His PCs are going to be exploring a big old library. But the space seems a bit too big and too empty to be worth going through the minutae of exploring (and mapping) every single room. Meanwhile, my PCs are going to be wandering through some dwarven ruins in which they are trapped. The space is too big and too empty to be worth going through the minutae of exploring (and mapping) every single room. But I still want a sense of the layout because my PCs will be returning to this place and trying to find some things later. More importantly, this is an RPG and if you abstract the exploration too much, you remove the decision points and the sense of control. Decision points are what put the R and the P in the RPG after all. It is a long article with lots of ideas but it is well worth the time to read it! Thinking about his advice and trying to apply it to your dungeon crawl you could have a VERY simple "Overview" map that shows nothing more than the main route through the lower parts of the dungeon. (Maybe they find a semi-completed map on a body near the end of the current level?) There can be A LOT of side corridors that remain unmapped. If the party decides to go off of the main route then you have geomorphs ready and move the party from one to another. That way you are not forced to map the entire thing to begin with, only the main route. OK, that was the main thing I wanted to pass on, but here are a couple of other resources to check out. This is from an article on the RPT site called "The 6 Best Random Dungeon Map Generators". (Alas, the last one is not longer available, so here are the 5 that are available): Dungeon Painter Online By pyromancers Curufea's Random Cave map generator Random Dungeon Generator Dave's Mapper Gozzys Random Map Creators If nothing else check out Gozzy's maps! The interface to create them is great and they churn out fantastic maps! Last but not least, this is just a great idea! I know it came from the RPT newsletter, but I only saved a chunk of the article, so I am not sure who wrote it or what issue it was in. Anyway the idea was that the GM downloaded a bunch of geomorphs, took them to OfficeMax, and ended up with about 100 laminated square tiles. The next time that they played he would wait for the party to reach the end of an existing tile and then deal another one, adding it to the map. Pretty cool for face to face gaming, but the next bit is what really caught my attention! After a copule of sessions he decided to change things up. I'll just quote the part of the article that I saved and let the GM explain: One evening, I decided to open the map up even further and allow player input. They had just defeated a vast array of monsters, and had some serious loot burning a hole in their pockets. So I allowed the players to spend gold to determine how the map tiles went down. When I dealt out a new tile, the players could spend gold to determine how the map was built. To spin the maptile, it cost 10 gold for every 90 degrees the tile was turned. It was 50 gold to replace the tile being dealt with a new randomly drawn maptile. This was an amazing success! The players enjoyed spending their money to get little bonuses like determining the makeup and rotation of the map tiles, and at the end of the game they even pooled their gold together to make a shortcut out of the dungeon. Brilliant! Imagine the fun of putting a tile down on the Roll20 VTT and then allowing the party to spend gold to have you rotate it a different direction, or to replace it with another tile! Anyway, I hope some of this helps with your current mapping dilemma.
